RUTHFULLY YOURS

MK Tzipi Livni is apparently well regarded at the UN. According to media reports, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called Livni and offered her the position of under-secretary-general.

Guterres’s offer to Livni is supposed to be a trade-off. Livni will receive the appointment in exchange for the US canceling its veto of his plan to appoint former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salaam Fayyad to serve as his envoy to Libya.

There are three basic problems with this proposed trade. First there is the problem with Fayyad.Leaving aside the question of the actual duties of a UN envoy to Libya, the question is why would Fayyad be a good candidate for anything?

Before Fayyad joined the PLO-controlled PA in 2002, he served for six years as the International Monetary Fund’s representative to the PA. In that position, Fayyad turned a blind eye to the embezzlement of the donor-financed PA budget to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Year in and year out, Fayyad did nothing to warn donors that the funds that they were providing the PA were being transferred to Swiss bank accounts or otherwise disappearing. In 1997 for instance, Fayyad said nothing as Arafat and his cronies caused $323 million, or 40% of the PA budget, to simply disappear.

Perhaps if he had piped up back then the international community might have rethought its support for PLO chief Yasser Arafat as he built the PA into a terrorism-financing kleptocracy.

Arafat appointed Fayyad to serve as PA finance minister in 2002. In that position, Fayyad went from apologist to enabler. He presided over the PA budget and kept the international donations flowing knowing full well that Arafat and his cronies were embezzling the funds to enrich themselves and finance terrorism while the Palestinian people got record unemployment and were indoctrinated to despise Israel and the West.

Fayyad’s facilitation of the PLO bosses’ grand larceny continued after Arafat’s death in 2004. He happily enabled Mahmoud Abbas’s theft as well.

For instance, in 2004 Fayyad did nothing to stop the theft of revenues from oil products by his bosses as they emptied the coffers of the PA’s Petroleum Authority.

When PA lawmakers asked him that year for an accounting of where revenues from oil products disappeared to, according to Issam Abu Issa, the founder of the Palestinian International Bank, Fayyad declared nonchalantly, “Unfortunately the documents related to the revenues from oil products – or how the money was used – cannot be found. They have disappeared from the ministry.”

According to a 2013 report from the European Court of Auditors, between 2008 and 2012, $2.7 billion in EU aid to the PA disappeared. Fayyad presided over the PA treasury and government as finance minister and prime minister during those years.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

New treatment to fight cancer. (TY Atid-EDI) I reported previously (Sep 2013) that Dr. Sarit Larisch of Haifa University discovered ARTS – a protein missing in tumors that regulates apoptosis (cell death). Israeli biotech ARTSaVIT is developing a treatment based on this research and has just received $6.3 million of funds.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-cancer-treatment-co-artsavit-raises-63m-1001170280

Diagnosing early cancer from blood tests. I reported on Israel’s Medial EarlySign previously (May 2015) when it was MedialCS and trialing its colon cancer early-warning algorithm (now called Colon Flag) with Israel’s Maccabi Health company. EarlySign is now designing and validating models for upper GI cancer, lung cancer, and epilepsy. https://www.youtube.com/embed/8LejHavZ7v8?rel-0
http://www.israel21c.org/new-medical-software-reveals-hidden-insights-into-your-health/

Positive results in trials of Alzheimer’s treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) In latest trials, the NeuroAD cranial device from Israel’s Neuronix (see here) slowed the progression of the disease in 85% of patients suffering mild Alzheimer’s. The treatment is now being used commercially in the UK (London, Berkshire, Chester and Manchester). http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/neuronix-reports-positive-results-from-its-multi-center-alzheimers-study-at-the-clinical-trials-in-alzheimers-disease-ctad-conference-609622515.html

Clues to defeating resistant bacteria. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered some surprising characteristics of bacteria. When phage-resistant bacteria are in close contact with phage-sensitive bacteria, the resistant bacteria lose their resistance. The discovery could help research into antibiotic resistance.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/33384 https://www.youtube.com/embed/YQLvTBCsOtM?rel=0

Record number of organ transplants. (TY Atid-EDI) A record 504 Israelis were saved thanks to organ transplants in 2016, up from 433 in 2015. The number of live kidney transplants (222) was also a record and included 129 donations from friends or strangers. 887,317 Israelis have now signed organ donor cards.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=39411

One Weekend in the Life of an Israeli EMS Paramedic. (TY Steve and United Hatzalah) Dov Maisel had six emergency calls during the 24 hours from Friday afternoon right through Shabbat. Five people were saved.
http://israelseen.com/2017/01/11/one-weekend-in-the-life-of-an-israeli-ems-paramedic/

Lung inflation device is aired on TV. I reported last week about Israel’s Guide In Medical (GIM) and its innovative tube for inflating collapsed lungs. GIM’s CEO Ariel Shrem has just spoken about the device on ILTV daily. https://www.youtube.com/embed/yOb8CmAORMY?rel=0

A fighting chance. I reported previously (Feb 2016) on Israel’s Intensix and its early-warning analysis of deteriorating Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. Intensix has won or come close to winning 3 recent startup competitions. It has also just received $8.3 million of financing. https://www.intensix.com/news
http://nocamels.com/2017/02/health-analytics-co-intensix-raises-8-3m/

Paralyzed UK policewoman walks again. Former British police officer Nicki Donnelly, who was paralyzed in 2009, can now walk again. She received a ReWalk exoskeleton from the Gerald Ronson Family Foundation and the UK Jewish Community Security Trust (CST). Nicki now wants to visit ReWalk’s Israeli inventor Amit Goffer. http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/robocop-re-walk/

Video#34 http://bit.ly/2kWV8OS; Entire mini-seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

Israel is urged to concede the historically and militarily most critical mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria, in return for a US, or a multinational, peacekeeping force, as well as US security guarantees or defense pact.

2. In order to be effective, defense pacts, and security guarantees – including peacekeeping monitoring or combat forces – must be reliable, durable, specific and politically/militarily sustainable. It must serve the interests of the foreign entity, which dispatches the force, lest it be ignored or summarily withdrawn.

3. However, the litany of US commitments, guarantees and defense pacts are characterized by four critical attributes – escape routes – designed to shield US interests in a way which undermines the effectiveness of the commitments: 1. non-specificity, vagueness and ambiguity, facilitating non-implementation; 2. Non-automaticity, facilitating delay, suspension and non-implementation; 3. Non-implementation if it is deemed harmful to US interests; 4. Subordination to the US Constitution, including the limits of presidential power.
4. For example, the NATO treaty – the tightest US defense pact – as ratified by the US Senate, commits the US to consider steps on behalf of an attacked NATO member, “as it deems necessary.” Moreover, in 1954, President Eisenhower signed a defense treaty with Taiwan, but in 1979, President Carter annulled the treaty unilaterally, with the support of Congress and the Supreme Court.

5. The May 25, 1950 Tripartite Declaration, by the US, Britain and France, included a commitment to maintain a military balance between Israel and the Arab states. However, on October 18, 1955, Secretary of State Dulles refused Israel’s request to buy military systems – to offset Soviet Bloc arm shipments to Egypt – insisting that the facts were still obscure. In 1957, President Eisenhower issued an executive agreement – to compensate for Israel’s full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula – committing US troops should Egypt violate the ceasefire and Sinai’s demilitarization. But, in 1967, President Johnson claimed that “[the commitment] ain’t worth a solitary dime,” while the UN peacekeepers fled upon the Egyptian invasion of the Sinai, the blockade of Israel’s port of Eilat, and the establishment of intra-Arab military force to annihilate Israel. In 1975, President Ford sent a letter to Prime Minister Rabin, stating that the US “will give great weight to Israel’s position that any peace agreement with Syria must be predicated on Israel remaining on the Golan Heights.” But, in 1979, President Carter contended that Ford’s letter hardly committed Ford, but certainly none of the succeeding presidents.

6. In an April 1975 AIPAC Conference speech, the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson dismissed security guarantees as harmful delusion: “Detente did not save Cambodia and it will not save Vietnam, despite the fact that we and the Soviets are co-guarantors of the Paris Accords. And that is something to keep in mind when one hears that we and the Soviets should play the international guarantee game in the Middle East.”

7. According to Prof. Noah Pelcovits, Political Sicence, UCLA: “[In the context of security arrangements] there is only one chance in three that the protector will come to the aid of its ally in wartime, and then only at the discretion of the protector…. What counts is the protector’s perception of self-interest. Otherwise, the commitment is not honored….”

8. Prof. Michla Pomerance, International Relations, Hebrew University, stated that US defense commitments, including the NATO Treaty, “are uniformly characterized by vagueness, non-specificity… and the explicit denial of any automatic obligation to use force… [in] accordance with the desire of the US, as promisor, to keep its options open…. Evasion by means of interpretation would not be a difficult task….”

9. The stationing of foreign peacekeeping tropps on Israel’s border would cripple Israel’s defense capabilities, requiring Israel to seek prior approval in preempting or countering belligerence, which would also strain US-Israel ties. At the same time, appearing to have enabled Israel to act freely, would damage US-Arab ties.

10. The assumption that inherently tenuous, intangible, open-ended and reversible US security commitments constitute an effective compensation for critical Israeli land, tangible, irreversible concessions – such as a retreat from the strategically and historically critical mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria – reflects detachment from the Washington constitutional labyrinth and recent precedents, engendering a false sense of security, thus compromising the existence of the Jewish state, transforming Israel from a robust national security producing asset to a frail national security consuming liability, undermining US interests and US-Israel relations.

11. The next video will expand on the inherent non-reliability of US and international security guarantees.

Analysts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean — and of the political spectrum — have been scrutinizing every syllable uttered by members of the new administration in Washington to determine whether U.S. President Donald Trump is as good a friend to the Jewish state as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes.

So far, four issues have been discussed and debated ad nauseam: U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley’s pronouncement that her government would not abandon Israel at the world body, as the Obama administration did when it enabled the passage of Security Council Resolution 2234, which deemed all Jewish presence beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines illegal; the nomination of David Friedman — a settlements sympathizer who supports relocating the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — as U.S. ambassador to Israel; a recent Trump administration warning that Israeli settlement construction could be potentially harmful to peace negotiations toward Palestinian statehood (the “two-state solution”); and the omission of any mention of Jews in the statement issued by the administration on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Where the bigger picture is concerned, Israel is observing Team Trump’s behavior toward Iran, telling Tehran that its saber-rattling and ballistic missile tests will incur serious consequences; imposing new sanctions on the mullah-led regime; and openly weighing the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

But the one question that has not been raised is how the Trump administration will respond when Israel is forced to go to war, yet again, with Hamas in Gaza and/or with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Middle East experts have been predicting, albeit cautiously, that neither scenario is likely in the near future, due to the internal difficulties each terrorist group is currently experiencing. Hezbollah is deeply entrenched in the Syrian civil war, and has already lost many of its men in the fighting. Hamas is suffering from a loss of income, as a number of European countries begin to reconsider the process of transferring cash earmarked for the rehabilitation of Gaza, which ends up paying for the rebuilding and enhancement of tunnel and rocket infrastructure.

Recent developments indicate, however, that more serious military action — in addition to retaliatory IDF moves following errant or aimed fire on Israel from just beyond its southern and northern borders — may be unavoidable.

Will Palestine exist in another generation? With the Trump administration gearing up for its meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week, it’s a question worth asking. The last thing the Trump administration should want is a repeat of the mistakes the Great Powers made a century ago when they created artificial countries.

Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Palestine among others were all carved up out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by the Great Powers — chiefly Britain and France — after the First World War. It was a recipe for continual strife, as peoples of different nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, religions and political traditions were forced to live together. The Great Powers created, in effect, mini multicultural, multinational states. The result was civil and sectarian discontent, and war, throughout much of the last 100 years.

We see the latest chapter of those horrors in Syria where yet another civil war has led to yet another split up. Iraq has de facto split, as has Yemen, and Lebanon, which originally was part of a multi-state Syrian federation. Jordan, whose Hashemites fought a civil war against its Palestinian Arab majority, is also tenuously held together.

The creation of a Palestinian state astride Israel — the two-state solution today’s Great Powers insist on — would have even less chance of survival than its failed neighbour states. The Arab clans of Palestine throughout the 20th century refused to accept a state of their own. Only in the 1960s did the idea of a Palestinian nation take shape when Yasser Arafat created the concept of an Arabic “Palestinian people.” Previously, “Palestinian” was a term that referred to all the residents of Palestine, Jews and Arabs. The original name of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was the Palestine Orchestra. The Jerusalem Post was first the Palestine Post.

But Arafat never forged a united people — most Palestinians only grudgingly accepted the rule of his Palestinian Authority and some never did. Few Palestinians identify chiefly with a national identity; their loyalty instead is clan-based — to the tight-knit group of extended families that share the same ancestry, based on the father’s male line and a preference for marrying within the clan. Palestinians pledge loyalty to their clan in a binding, formal code of honour backed by local militias. An attack on one clan member is an attack on all members.

Clan-based systems of governance do not lend themselves to nation states. Little surprise, then, that after Arafat died, civil war broke out and Gaza broke off from the West Bank to form its own statelet. To make dicier still the notion of a coherent Palestinian nation whose people share common values, Gaza is theocratic, run by Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, while the West Bank is largely secular.

Local media reported a man opened fire on a bustling market, injuring at least three people who were buying groceries ahead of the Jewish sabbath. Israeli police have said one man also suffered stab wounds after being knifed in the neck with a screwdriver. The ambulance service rushed to the scene and confirmed they treated a man and a woman, in their 50s, for bullet wound injuries to their lower bodies.

Paramedics added the stab victim was a 40-year-old man. Police branded the incident a terror attack, adding the suspect was overpowered by shoppers using their bare hands.The incident occurred at a market in the central Israeli town of Petah Tikva, on Thursday afternoon.

Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the suspect was arrested at the scene.A police investigation is underway. According to reports the suspect is a 19-year-old Palestinian. Video from the scene shows a large crowd gathered around the suspect, who is on the floor and surrounded by armed police. The attack came just hours after an explosion ripped through the Gaza border with Egypt, killing two Palestinians in what appeared to be a strike on cross-border smuggling tunnels.